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It was a thrill to have such significant games industry figures come to visit us on Saturday. The mentors, dads and dad-mentors were probably the most excited; Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake were probably the most exhilarating games of our generation.

I was unsatisfied with how much benefit people were getting from continuing with the Tanks tutorial and I decided that we’d looked at it enough. Partially because I know some people want to implement shooting for their own projects and partially because one of our guests had invented the entire first-person-shooter genre, I decided to do a project to demonstrate different ways of implementing shooting in a game.

Please excuse the tinny sound; I was using the computers built in microphone.

There are two main ways to handle shooting: ray-casting and physics-based projectiles. We’re going to do both so lets discuss them in turn.

Ray-casting

Ray-casting uses mathematics to determine if a target is in our cross-hairs and, if it is, registers a hit instantly. It’s a good technique to use where the bullet is very fast moving and distances are relatively short. Regardless of action movie tropes, nobody is dodging a fast-moving bullet in real-life!

In Unity the Physics class contains several Raycast methods (documentation here). They all look along a line from a point and return ‘true’ if that line crosses through a Collider. The specific version we’re using can fill in a RaycastHit object with information about what it hit, if it hit anything.

To determine if we hit anything we must:

Find the position and forward direction of the FPS Camera. This represents where we are and where we’re looking towards.

Call Physics.Raycast with this information. If it didn’t cross any colliders, then we are finished.

If it did hit something, then we check to see if that object is a target. We have tagged all target objects in the scene as “Target” so we can easily check this.

If it is a target, we perform the effect we want. In this case, we push the target away from us with force applied to its RigidBody . In another case, we might want to actually destroy the GameObject instead.

Physics-based projectiles

A physics-based projectile is actually an object in the scene. It has a Collider so that it can detect collisions and a RigidBody so that it is affected by physics.

In many cases of physics-based projectiles, the Collider is simply a trigger and once an collision is detected, an effect, such as reducing the target’s health, is applied to the target.

Our specific physics-based projectile weapon is a cannonball. In this specific case, we actually allow the cannonball to hit the target and the physics engine takes care of the effect (knocking the target away).

The general steps that we need for physics-based projectiles are:

Find the position and forward direction of the FPS Camera. This represents where we are and where we’re looking towards.

Instantiate an instance of our projectile prefab. Position it so that it’s slightly in front of us and not intersecting with the FPS Controller’s own Collider.

Give the projectile some forward velocity.

Either:

Have the projectile detect collisions and perform an appropriate effect on the target, or

Simply allow the physics engine to take care of the impact.

The cannonball prefab has a small script attached to it. It detects collisions. Once the first collision is detected, a coroutine is launched. This coroutine waits for two seconds and then destroys the GameObject. This means that cannonballs have a limited life-span and don’t end up littered all over our level.

Area-effect weapon

We have also implemented an area-effect weapon, namely a grenade. In many ways it is similar to the cannonball but we project it with a more modest velocity.

Once created, however, it’s behaviour is very different. A coroutine is launched as soon as it is created. This coroutine waits for a few seconds to mimic a grenade fuse. It then “explodes”.

To explode, the grenade does the following:

Plays an explosion sound on it’s own AudioSource.

Instansiates a particle-effect prefab at the grenade’s location to display an visual explosion effect.

Disables the grenade’s MeshRender component so that he body of the grenade can’t be seen any more.

Uses Physics.OverlapSphere (documentation here) to find all Colliders within a given radius of the grenade

Loops over these Colliders. If the collider is not attached to an active GameObject or if that GameObject is not tagged as a target, we ignore it.

If it is an active target, we use RigidBody.AddExplosionForce (documentation here) to apply an explosion force, emanating from the grenade’s position, to the target.

Two seconds after the “explosion” the grenade GameObject, now invisible, destroys itself to remove itself from the scene. This short delay gives time for scripts to complete and sounds to finish playing.

Please note that although the grenade wasn’t working correctly on Saturday during our session, it’s fully functional now.

Gun selection

Gun selection is handled using the “[” and “]” keys. In the past we have tended to use Input.GetAxis to detect user input. This is good for where we wish to perform an action continuously as long as a key is held down. It’s not so good where we wish to perform a since action in response to a single keystroke. For that, using Input.GetKeyDown (documentation here) is better and that’s what we do.

The selected weapon is stored using an enum. An enum is a special variable type which can only take one of a number of pre-defined values. Since we have a limited list of weapons, three to be exact, this works well for us.

Putting it all together

Our level is a simple terrain. It’s been textured and had trees, grass and a wind zone added to it. There is a simple lake. A few target spheres have been positioned around the map and a box containing a number of small targets has been created as a good place to test the grenade in particular.

A standard first person controller prefab has been added to the scene. Our own GunController script has been attached to it as a component. GunController handles all the aiming and firing of the weapons.

Sound effects for the project are all from www.freesound.org with thanks to the original creators. All other third party assets are from the Unity Standard Assets pack.

Downloading the project

The project can be downloaded from DropBox here. Please ensure you have updated to Unity 5.3.4 before opening this project. Be aware, it’s relatively large at 160MB+.

Update: This post has been updated with a link to download the project. See the bottom of the post.

This week we started work on the Unity Tanks tutorial. This is a single-keyboard, two-player, tank game where users can complete in a number rounds against each other.

We began with downloading the tutorial assets from the Unity Assets Store. This tutorial comes with many lovely assets including 3d models and audio clips.

The assets, as downloaded, contained a “Completed” folder. We deleted this first, as it has a second copy of many of the scripts and assets in the project and had the potential to create confusion.

We created a new scene and deleted the default directional light as we wouldn’t be needing it. Then we added the provide “LevelArt” prefab. This prefab contains the entire playing area and also contains a directional light. We discussed the different types of lighting that we can have in a game: ambient, directional, point, and spotlight. The image below shows the same scene lit in each of these four ways, respectively.

We then set our camera to be orthographic. We described the difference between orthographic and perspective cameras. With perspective cameras, the space the camera sees in front of it is shaped like a pyramid and things that are further away look smaller (as in real life). With an orthographic camera, the space the camera sees in front of it is box-shaped and things do not get smaller the further away they get. For some game types, the less realistic orthographic camera is a good stylistic choice. We also removed the standard skybox and just changed the background to a solid colour, again a good stylistic choice for this game.

We then started to build our tank. The 3d model was pre-supplied, so we added it to the hierarchy. We then added a rigidbody, a box collider and two audio sources for the playback of sounds. We were able to add constraints on the rigidbody to prevent the tank from ever moving vertically, or from rolling or pitching. Applying these constraints both prevents unwanted movements and makes the physics engine’s job much easier.

Finally, we added two dust trail particle effects to the tracks of the tank. These were also pre-supplied as assets for the project.

We had just started to look at tank movement and that’s where we’ll pick it up again next week. The project can be downloaded here.

Remember that you should now be starting to plan and work on your own projects for the end of the year. Best of luck and we’re here to help in any way we can!

This week, you can choose to either create a 2-player networked game with a friend, or if you don’t feel like doing networking, you can write a 1-player version where you play against the computer. It’s up to you!